"More of this story is true than you would believe," reads the
caption at the beginning of The Men Who Stare at Goats, but
let's be real: No one involved in this movie goes out of their way to
give it the sting of veracity.

Director Grant Heslov and screenwriter Peter Straughan are adapting
a nonfiction book by journalist Jon Ronson, it's true, and in that book
Ronson explores several stranger-than-fiction characters and government
operations. For the screen, however, Ronson has been turned into
Michigan reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), who finds himself
distraught after his wife leaves him for his editor, who happens to
have a prosthetic arm. You'd be forgiven for wondering whether this is
the part of the story that isn't true. (It indeed happens to be that
part.) And then for wondering how you're supposed to know the
difference.

Determined to throw himself into his work, Wilton heads to the
Middle East to find a story in the Iraq war. What he finds instead is a
bizarre-sounding tale about a U.S. military operation created to
develop "Jedi Warriors" — soldiers with psychic abilities. Lyn
Cassady (George Clooney) was one of those would-be warriors decades
earlier; now, he's in Iraq and ready to act as Wilton's guide into the
strange meeting of the Army and the paranormal.

For the next hour, the narrative swings between the pair's Middle
East misadventures and the history of the First Earth Battalion,
initiated by idealistic Vietnam vet Bill Django (Jeff Bridges). Heslov
approaches both parts with the same surreal, goofy sensibility, and the
result is comedy that's often as entertaining as it is bizarre. Bridges
revels in a loose performing energy reminiscent of The Big
Lebowski's The Dude, while Clooney conveys the earnestness of a
true believer. At just 93 minutes, Goats is light on its
feet.

But that same lightness also becomes a hindrance to the film's
really being able to go for the satirical jugular. As Ronson's true
story turns, Django's blissed-out notion of warriors for peace is
appropriated by a military able to focus only on inflicting pain, like
the technique suggested by the film's title in which psychics kill
animals just by looking at them. Ronson draws a direct connection
between 1980s psychic research and later applications of psychological
warfare, which is a fairly tragic, if perhaps inevitable, perversion of
the battalion's New Age-y intent.

That said, the film's tone is too frivolous to permit serious
contemplation of militaristic tunnel vision. Heslov and Straughan take
a few swipes at greedy civilian contractors, but miss the big target:
an armed forces apparatus that sees problems as nails to be hammered
down.

It's easy to feel the pain of a screenwriter tasked with translating
a true story into a three-act conventional narrative. What drives the
story forward, after all, if not this fictional journalist and
fictional quest? But there's still a difference between manufacturing a
structure and taming the cynical frustration at the core of Ronson's
book.

The Men Who Stare at Goats becomes a movie that's unwilling
to do much more than grin and wink at you, nowhere better exemplified
than in giving McGregor — who once played a young Obi-wan Kenobi
— a line like, "What's a Jedi Warrior?" It's a line with an arch
self-awareness from a movie that, while honest about only telling a
partly true story, doesn't seem particularly interested in making sure
the audience understands which part.